Harvard professor Annette
Gordon-Reed—who has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer
Prize, for her book The Hemingses of Monticello (2009)—is
widely acknowledged to be the world’s foremost authority on the
nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his toothsome
slave, Sally Hemings. In chapters 13 through 16 of that book and in
several subsequent interviews and talks, she goes into
considerable speculative detail—e.g., Jefferson seducing or perhaps
even raping Hemings in Paris and Hemings, while pregnant, returning
to Monticello with Jefferson—concerning how events likely unfolded
between the two.

The skeleton she
fleshes out for her story is the account of Sally’s son Madison
Hemings in the Ohio paper, Pike County Republican (13 Mar.
1873), published by Samuel F. Wetmore. The memoir, titled “Life
among the Lowly, No. 1,” was the first in a series of articles
designed perhaps to revitalize a slumping newspaper. What bigger bomb
could have been dropped than a story about Jefferson fathering a
child by one of his slaves? States the 68-years-old Madison Hemings,
“During that time [while Jefferson was minister to France] my
mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called
back home she was enciente [sic; Fr. enceinte]
by him.” He continues: “Soon after their arrival, she gave birth
to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a
short time. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the
father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison
(myself), and Eston—three sons and one daughter.”

Those and other
claims of Madison Hemings are today customarily taken at face value
by historians. Gordon-Reed, in “Why Jefferson Scholars Were the
Last to Know,” asserts boldly, “The most important historical
witness in this story is undoubtedly Madison Hemings.” If so, then
much rides on the credibility of the story. If Madison is a
trustworthy witness, then Jefferson is implicated in the paternity of
Madison and his siblings.

There is one
unsettling issue. Gordon-Reed has turned doubting the memoir into a
racial issue. In Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American
Tragedy (1997), she notes that prior to the DNA results
which showed that Jefferson could be the father of Eston Hemings
(Madison’s brother), scholars have not taken seriously the memoir
because Madison was black. Blacks have traditionally been
marginalized because of their color.

Because of
Gordon-Reed’s protestations concerning the marginalization of black
figures by historians—and there is much to be said on behalf of
those protestations—Madison Hemings’s memoir concerning Jefferson
being his and his siblings’ father is nearly universally accepted
today by Jeffersonian historians. So too are many other claims. Ought
they to be? Is the issue overall one of color? What about evidence?

Much rides on the
truthfulness or untruthfulness of key claims in Madison’s memoir.
In his Literary Commonplace Book, Jefferson, commonplacing
Lord Bolingbroke (§57), says:

A story
circumstantially related, ought not to be received on the faith of
tradition; since the last reflection on human nature is sufficient to
shew [sic] how unsafely a system of facts and circumstances
can be trusted for it’s preservation to memory alone, and for it’s
conveiance [sic] to oral report alone; how liable it must be
to all those alterations, which the weakness of the human mind must
cause necessarily, and which the corruption of the human heart will
be sure to suggest.

For history to be authentic,
Jefferson, continuing to copy Bolingbroke, adds that “these are
some of the conditions necessary.” He comes up with 4 conditions,
which I’ll refer to as CN1–CN4:

1. it must be writ
by a cotemporary author, or by one who had cotemporary materials in
his hands. 2. it must have been published among men who are able to
judge of the capacity of th[e] author, and of the authenticity of the
memorials on whic[h] he writ. 3. nothing repugnant to the universal
experience of mankind must be contained in it. 4. the principal facts
at least, which it contains, must be confirmed by collateral
testimony, that is, by the testimony of thos[e] who had no common
interest of country, of religion, or of profession, to disguise or
falsify the truth.

What do we get if
we apply Bolingbroke’s sensible “conditions necessary” to
Madison’s testimony?

CN1 is
not met. Madison writes of events—e.g., his mother staying at
Jefferson’s hotel in France and not with daughter Maria, Sally
Hemings’s son Tom Jefferson’s birth back at Monticello and death
shortly thereafter, Dolly Madison insisting on naming Madison at a
visit to Monticello at the time of Madison’s birth—at which he
was not present. Many of his claims are events that occurred prior to
him being born. He was not an eyewitness, and thus could only have
heard circumstantially of such events.

CN2 is
not met. The publisher, Wetmore, was a Republican Party activist, and
therefore, very likely anti-Jeffersonian. His paper would have had
much to gain by publishing scandalous material about the deceased
president. Moreover, the phrasing throughout strongly suggests either
that Wetmore wrote the memoir, given orally to him by Madison, or
that he greatly edited what Madison wrote. Gordon-Reed concedes the
former. Madison admits in the testimony: “I learned to read by
inducing the white children to teach me the letters and something
more; what else I know of books I have picked up here and there till
now I can read and write.” It seems clear that he did not write the
memoir.

CN3 is
met. What Bolingbroke aims at are claims that belie common human
experiences—for instance, testimony of a human head growing on a
tree stump or of Jesus vinifying
water. There are questionable claims in the memoir—e.g., that Sally
Hemings was pregnant upon returning to Monticello and that she
bartered with Jefferson before returning with him (she threatened to
stay in France, where she would be free, unless “her children
should be freed at the age of twenty-one”)—and claims that are
very likely false—e.g., that Dolley Madison “begged the privilege
of naming me [Madison Hemings]” (she was likely in Washington at
the time of Madison’s birth)—and still other claims that are
manifestly false—e.g., that Jefferson “had but little taste or
care for agricultural pursuits”—but there are no claims that
belie common human experience.

Finally, CN4
is not met. The principal claims of Madison’s memoir are not
vetted. They have not been confirmed independently by credible and
dispassionate persons. They have instead been contradicted by
eye-witnesses: e.g., Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon, who stated
concerning Jefferson’s avowed paternity of Harriet Hemings [Sally’s
daughter]: “She was not his daughter; she was *****’s daughter. I
know that. I have seen him come out of her mother’s room many a
morning when I went up to Monticello very early.”

Given
Gordon-Reed’s concession that Madison Hemings is “the most
important historical witness” of the presumed liaison, we find that
there are good reasons for doubting key claims of Madison’s
testimony. The testimony fails to live up to three of Bolingbroke’s
(and most likely Jefferson’s) four conditions necessary for
authentic history.

Gordon-Reed and
numerous other pro-paternity Jeffersonian scholars have stated that
the DNA evidence by itself does not show Jefferson to be Eston’s
father. It cannot. It only picks out Thomas Jefferson as a possible
father, and there are other likely candidates such as brother
Randolph Jefferson or his sons. Consequently, historical evidence
must decide the issue, and as Gordon-Reed concedes, Madison Hemings’s
testimony is the key piece of historical evidence. Thus, if there are
good reasons for doubting the “testimony,” then historians are in
no position to assert categorically or with likelihood that Jefferson
was the father of Madison, or Eston, or any of Sally Hemings’s
children. There are, I have shown, good Bolingbrokean reasons for
doubting the testimony.